Sunday, October 2, 2016

Donald Trump's Tax Returns May Be Hiding This Bombshell from the 1990s

Hint: It’s NOT Marla Maples.

It’s plausible to believe that, deep inside Donald Trump’s many years of tax returns, which he has declined to make public, a surprise lurks. Heck, we already know him to be a serial exaggerator, at minimum, a person who has testified that his “feelings” influence his calculation of his net worth. More than one commentator has speculated that should Trump’s tax returns surface, they could reveal him to be worth dramatically less than he proclaims.

Wouldn’t it be remarkable if the tycoon, who was claiming even in his darkest days in the 1990s to be worth over $1 billion, was admitting to the IRS that he was really not just dead broke, but hugely under water? And that a special escape provision called “insolvency”—a place Trump has never publicly confessed to being—saved him a bundle in taxes?

With no tax returns to read, we don’t know if any of this happened. But the question is one of the most intriguing in the saga of Trump’s revival.

(The following analysis does not imply that Trump did anything unethical. Employing the insolvency exclusion, if indeed he used it, is a legitimate way to lower liability. It’s a strategy that responsible tax advisers recommend all the time. The Trump campaign, presented with a detailed list of the points in this article, did not make anybody available for comment.)